April 3, 2004

fred wilson to do blogads?

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Fred Wil­son is thin­king of bag­ging Goo­gle Adsense in favor of Blo­gads.

Jeff Jar­vis and Hugh Mac­leod think I should switch to Blo­gads. Maybe I will. I’ve lear­ned all I am going to learn about AdSense. If I can con­ti­nue to send the checks to The Gra­meen Foun­da­tion [the cha­rity where Fred dona­tes all his ad reve­nues to], you might start seeing Blo­gAds here soon.

Nice to get a men­tion– Thanks, Fred. In the com­ment sec­tion I left this mes­sage:

Well, as Jeff said, I’m sure a lot of VC-related folks would be deligh­ted to adver­tise [Blo­gads] on your site, and pay good money for the pri­ve­lege. And unlike Goo­gle, you can accept or reject their appli­ca­tion, depen­ding on merit.

Blo­gads to me is less a num­bers game, more of a way of star­ting a dia­lo­gue with a new seg­ment of the blo­gosphere. I find when I buy blo­gads, my deci­sion is based less and less on pure traf­fic num­bers, and more on fee­lings of per­so­nal affi­nity with the site.

What makes blo­gads so effec­tive, I believe, is that unlike Goo­gle Adsense, the adver­ti­ser, “Mr VC Law­yer Guy” has to like Fred Wil­son, and Fred Wil­son has to like him back… or at least, give him a nod.

That nod is worth a lot.

I hope Fred does start pla­cing Blo­gads on his site. I’d cer­tainly buy some, bud­get per­mit­ting.
Fred is well known in New York as a suc­cess­ful ven­ture capi­ta­list, so obviously he’s not doing this for the money. My guess is it’s a busi­ness that inte­rests him, and he wants to get some first-hand expe­rience of the game before con­si­de­ring inves­ting.
My guess is blog­ver­ti­sing will be big busi­ness in a few years. Goo­gle has the num­bers, but not the huma­nity ele­ment. Blo­gads has the huma­nity ele­ment, but not the num­bers. Just a mat­ter of time before some­body comes up with a pac­kage that offers both.

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